The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU) says overcrowding in Ontario hospitals, including Health Sciences North in Sudbury, should not be treated as "the new normal," but as a symptom of the province underfunding hospitals.
In a release today, OCHU said the province should fully fund 40 new, permanent beds at Health Sciences North to deal with constant overcrowding, bringing the number of beds at HSN from 458 to 498.
The council points to the influx of patients suffering from the flu and other respiratory illnesses in the past couple of months as evidence the hospital doesn't have the capacity to meet the demand for care.
Arguing the hospital is short of beds, Sharon Richer, OCHU’s secretary-treasurer and former HSN staff, said the situation is not a “blip” and shouldn't be accepted by the public as “the new normal.”
Occupancy rates (which OCHU pegs at between 110 and 120 per cent) have been high since the start of 2017, as Sudbury.com has reported.
OCHU says the data shows Ontario has the fewest hospital beds of any province and the fewest staff for those beds. In less than two decades Ontario has cut more than 18,000 hospital beds, the council argues, which has led to "overcapacity for long periods of time with ad hoc patient beds being put in tub rooms, solariums and emergency department hallways."
“All this poses potential harm to patients who are entitled to timely and safe hospital care,” says Richer.
Back in November in her annual report, Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk said much the same thing, finding that overcrowding at Ontario hospitals was harming care.
The hospital has not said it is short beds. What it has said is the high-number of alternate level of care patients (ALC, patients, generally elderly, who no longer need acute care but are too frail to be at home alone) account for much of the overcrowding.
Improving capacity in the community to provide services for those who fall under the ALC banner has long been argued as the solution, but despite efforts over the past several years in that regard (most recently as November, 2016), no long-term fix has been found.
Data shows hospitals in the other provinces are funded at 25 per cent more than Ontario hospitals, OCHU says.
OCHU also says the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) says the average occupancy has grown to more than 92 per cent at Ontario hospitals, adding that Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office estimates health care needs about a 5.3-per-cent annual increase to meet basic costs.
